Her Doctor
by Hildwyn
Summary: Post-Journey's End. Rose/Ten. He may look like her Doctor, sound like him, act like him, but it isn't really him. But she may be able to come to terms with that someday.


_My first Whofic...you know it's time to fire your muse when he refuses to write anything for your primary fandom, and instead abandons you to the mercies of a...bad wolf, who has her own ideas about what you should write._

_I don't own Doctor Who, and will never be able to claim that. All that stuff goes to the BBC, and the brilliant geniuses who work on all aspects of the show. Those lucky people. I'm of course, not making any money off of this. Naught but a humble (ie poor) college student._

--

She was angry at him, at first. Dropping off his human-Time Lord-doppleganger with the orders to watch over him, to heal him, like he was some sort of replacement for him. For the man she loved. For the Doctor. She didn't love this impostor—he wasn't her Doctor. She'd sobbingly told him that repeatedly. One heart, one life, part human—that wasn't the man she fell in love with.

Her mother had shook her head at her. She said he was the same man, and it was being horribly superficial to pine over a man who was long gone when the same one was right beside her. One who loved her enough to stay beside her even when she threw fits and attempted to ignore him completely. But it wasn't superficial—and she wanted to scream that to the world, to let them know it. If anyone here was guilty of being superficial, it was him for thinking that she'd love a bloke just because he looked exactly like him. He even sounded like him sometimes.

But it wasn't _him_.

How hard was that to understand? And she couldn't even tell that to the Doctor, because once again he'd left her standing on that beach. That hated, awful beach.

She thought that her heart had broken beyond repair the first time she had to stand there and watch him fade away out of existence. She thought that she would never live again. She'd spend every waking moment since then thinking of him, and trying to get back to him—getting Torchwood to hire her, working there, traveling across the universes as the stars winked out one by one, as the darkness encroached. But she found him, and for a few glorious seconds, she was alive. She was running, each step she took, every breathe she took in and released, felt so real. Like she had awoken from a dream, a nightmare, and come back to reality.

Everything, her journey back to her universe had been a yo-yoing of emotions and feelings. She was at the height of elation only to have it slashed and ruined, to be forced into the pits of despair as she thought she was seeing the last of the Doctor. Joy to heartache, bliss to despair, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

And now, after all that, they couldn't get a moment of peace. It was hurried goodbyes with everyone, and that damned Bad Wolf Bay. And he left her again.

She didn't think it could hurt more, but it did. Hurt even more because he left her with his double—the double who wasn't his double. Left her as in, 'my regeneration went all wonky, didn't expect this—here you go, new me, fix him, will you? I'll be off saving the universe again.' All that...and he ran off like a coward, couldn't even say goodbye.

She was angry at first.

But it was so hard to stay angry with him—with the Doctor. She thought she could keep a grip on her anger, holding it tight, using it to motivate her so that she could find a way to be with him again. But the Doctor—no, no, he wasn't the Doctor, he was the Doctor-Copy. He'd find little ways of making a chink in her anger. A little comment about her mother (which should have made her more furious, and she tried, she really did), that manic energy as he went on and on about some timey-quantum-whatsit called device, the way he could go from that intense soul-searching stare, to his excited child with presents on Christmas Day look without hardly a pause.

The more and more she tried to look for ways that he was different from her Doctor, that he wasn't her Doctor...the more she saw how he was the Doctor.

He was the first one who made her laugh since being stranded in this universe again. And even though he wasn't a full Time Lord the way he used to be, and they weren't running across the stars, the universe as their playground like they once had...he brought adventure to her everyday life. Just like he used to.

She wondered if the Doctor would have been content as this Doctor to allow her to call the shots—to negotiate with the aliens, to protect the Earth, to drag him along on her adventures. To pull her back when she risked going too far.

She was angry with him, at first.

Then she discovered that this had been as much for healing her, as it had been for helping him. For her, not only for the Doctor. For _her_ Doctor. Because he was her Doctor—and he cured her and her anger, and he made her a better person for it. He may not have started out as her Doctor, but he was through and through, even if he had a doppleganger running around in another universe. That was the other Doctor, now.

_Fin._


End file.
